In grade 6, I started to love singing and wanted to be on The Voice Kids1. I thought my voice was strong and that belting through a Frozen ballad would prove it. My mom hired a personal vocal coach to prepare me for my audition. She suggested I sing “Kiss Me” by One Direction instead, which I disagreed with but accepted, and she also choreographed some dance moves to go with it. On the day, I stood in front of the judges and performed it completely out of beat.
There’s a Vietnamese expression for this kind of failure: “Did not make it past the parking lot/Rớt từ vòng gửi xe”, meaning you didn’t even make it inside before it fell apart.
I didn’t stop singing after that. In grade 10, I played the female Joker in a musical my teachers wrote using Marianas Trenches songs. I almost cried during the audition monologue, which probably landed me the role. I did cry during a solo of “Audition” from La La Land during my school’s musical showcase in grade 12. A teacher came up afterward and said it made him cry too. I don’t know if that’s a compliment on my performance or evidence that we were both having an emotional week, but I chose to take it as the former.
Later on, I didn’t get cast in Mamma Mia in undergrad. In first year of vet school, I chose the university musical over a veterinary club because my mom said: “You’ll get plenty of science already, use the other side of your brain”. I got in, and it ended up being one of the best things about that year. The Mamma Mia thing still stings a little, though.
Baking went the same way. I have over a decade of it behind me now, and if you ask the people I love, they’ll tell you my crème brûlée and banoffee pie are irreplaceable. What they don’t usually mention: the macarons that wouldn’t rise no matter what I tried. The cookies I pulled out already burnt. The cheesecake—and I was so confident about that cheesecake—that my brother Jake, who will eat cheesecake under almost any circumstances, politely declined. I kept going anyway, because I have a serious sweet tooth, and because watching someone’s face when they eat something you made well is its own kind of happiness.
Basketball started because I had a crush on a tall guy in my high school class who played exceptionally well. Absolutely rational in a high-schooler’s brain. My best friend Tzu-Chia was actually good at the sport, and she pulled me into sessions with her Taiwanese friends. At some point I started caring about the game independently of the guy. I tried out for the school team, didn’t make it. My friends persuaded the coach to give me a second chance, which says more about them than me, but I’m counting it. For most of my first year, I was benched. Once, I accidentally shot on my own team’s hoop. At the time, this felt less like a mistake and more like compelling evidence that basketball was not my thing. Yet by grade 12, I was a co-leader. We won three championships.
Almost everything I’m proud of, I was first terrible at. It’s a reminder not to put pressure on myself to be good at something the moment I start it. I started veterinary medicine not knowing how to restrain a dog. I started vet school not knowing how to draw blood from a real vein. I started clinical rotations not having done a single real appointment or surgery, only ones in a classroom. I’m still not good at plenty of it. But I’m starting to think that’s allowed, at least when you're starting out.
It’s 12:30am and I have surgery at 8:30am tomorrow, which I’m so excited about (wiggling my feet in bed right now). I’m reading a Japanese novel about ordinary people living near a hippo statue in a park2, and what I love about it is the same thing I love about Nguyễn Nhật Ánh books, the same thing I loved about the summer heat I could feel through the pages as a kid: that ordinary life has texture, and that small details can wreck you a little if you let them.
Maybe that’s why I keep trying new things even when I’m bad at them at first, to experience those slivers of life. I didn’t start by knowing who I was and then go try things. I tried things badly and kept going.
I didn’t know what cPLI or omeprazole were before starting vet school. Now I’m comfortable prescribing them in the right cases. I still make mistakes in exam rooms, still land on the wrong diagnosis, still stumble through client conversations. The only way through is to be bad at it long enough to become better3.
So somewhere in the accumulation of wrong beats and burnt batches and second chances, a person was made.
A musician. A baker. A basketball player. A writer.
And, slowly, a veterinarian.
Finally letting the world (of about 70 people) know my deepest, darkest secret.
“The healing hippo of Hinode park”, by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Takami Nieda.